Teachers in Rhode Island currently maintain their certification by showing evidence of continuous professional development. Creating an IPlan and reviewing the IPlan of a peer is a unit-wide assignment in the School of Education for all student teachers. The steps below are designed to guide you through this process so that we can complete it efficiently.
Complete the form based on one of the lessons you taught last week. Be sure to write down specific evidence from either your lesson plan or your memory of your enactment for each assessment you give.
Use a highlighter to identify areas of your teaching/lesson that were either below standard or that you feel needs improvement
Synthesize your review by completing the following table as best your can:
What is the need?
How will improvement help your students?
How will improvement help your school?
RIBT Standard/Element Addressed?
1.
Deepen my content knowledge
A better understanding of content area material will help me to provide my students with better understanding and allow them to gain a stronger foundation of scientific knowledge that can be applied in life and future academic situations.
This will help my school by raising NECAP scores, and producing more academically prepared students for the next grade and the real world.
2.5 Teachers use a variety of explanations and representations of concepts, including analogies, metaphors, experiments, demonstrations, and illustration, that develop conceptual understanding.
2.
3.
4.
Formulate a professional development goal based the needs that you have identified. This goal should be:
measurable/observable
should lead to improvement of teaching, student achievement, and/or improvement of learning environment.
should describe new knowledge or skills that you will acquire and how that knowledge/skill will affect the school/district setting.
linked to applicable Rhode Island Beginning Teacher Standards and elements, e.g. RIBTS 2.4.
In the space below, describe your professional development goal. In a second paragraph, use the information above to provide a rationale for your goal by explaining the personal need that it will address as well as how addressing this goal benefits your students and your school.
I. Professional Development Goal
My personal professional development goal is to obtain a greater understanding of content area knowledge.
I feel that if I achieve a deeper level of understanding of material within my content area that will be part of the RI state curriculum, I will have a better pool of information to pull from when teaching this material to my students. Some of the specific topics covered in the current curriculum were not covered to as great of an extent in my undergraduate career as I would like and it would benefit my confidence in teaching this area. Having a greater wealth of information from which to use will provide me with a greater base to use different representations of material. I will have access to more examples, demonstrations, experiments which will only benefit the experience I can provide when conveying concepts to students. My students will have a greater understanding of the concepts for which I am able to provide numerous representations, at differing levels. This will also benefit my school by helping to raise the current standardized test scores of students in science. Some of the topics covered in tests like NECAP are difficult for students because they have only seen them in one specific context or example and may not be able to apply their knowledge from that one example to a similar but different situation like they may see on the test. Overall, by developing a deeper understanding of any content related material I will be enriching my teaching and my students and school will benefit from this.
Now that you have a PD goal, think about what type of learning opportunities you will participate in to address your needs. Use these links to investigate learning options:
Based on what you have found out, write a 1-2 paragraph narrative outlining at least two ways (PD categories) you will engage in engage in by the end of your first year of teaching. For each activity, explain how you think it will address the need that you have identified.
II. Professional Development Plan
By the end of my first year teaching I would like to have engaged in professional development in the form of teaching workshops and also a research experience. I think that attending teaching workshops that focus on teaching specific concepts within the scope of science, such as the energy workshop held by NEED that I attended this previous fall, I will gain a greater understanding of the specific concepts being addressed, as well as learning new and different ways to teach and represent these concepts. Attending these workshops also provides an opportunity to interact with other science teachers working on the same concepts that may be able to even further my scope of different ways to convey or represent these concepts. These workshops would be useful to reach my professional development goal by serving both the need for greater understanding and providing with alternative or new methods to illustrate concepts. I would also like to attend a teacher research experience for a period of time within this first year or the summer before or after. I feel that as science teachers we should all have the opportunity to work with scientists, act as scientists and get the hands on experience that research provides to truly understand science. Having the chance to study in depth would provide an opportunity to greatly extend my content knowledge in a specific area of science. Doing this will be incredibly useful in teaching because I will not only have learned about subject as a student, but also having worked with the subject I will be able to draw on my own experiences in the classroom to provide multiple representations of material. This is the best way I think I would be able to get a better understanding of content knowledge, and provide me with resources not so easily found in textbooks. I have seen that NASA, many universities, and the NSTA provide very interesting programs specifically catering to the needs of science teachers seeking to participate in research opportunities.
Print your PD plan to PDF
Post your PD Plan to True Outcomes
Return to True Outcomes to evaluate a peer's plan the following week.
EDC 484 IPlan Peer Evaluation
Teachers in Rhode Island currently maintain their certification by showing evidence of continuous professional development. Creating an IPlan and reviewing the IPlan of a peer is a unit-wide assignment in the School of Education for all student teachers. The steps below are designed to guide you through this process so that we can complete it efficiently.Formulate a professional development goal based the needs that you have identified. This goal should be:
In the space below, describe your professional development goal. In a second paragraph, use the information above to provide a rationale for your goal by explaining the personal need that it will address as well as how addressing this goal benefits your students and your school.
I. Professional Development Goal
My personal professional development goal is to obtain a greater understanding of content area knowledge.I feel that if I achieve a deeper level of understanding of material within my content area that will be part of the RI state curriculum, I will have a better pool of information to pull from when teaching this material to my students. Some of the specific topics covered in the current curriculum were not covered to as great of an extent in my undergraduate career as I would like and it would benefit my confidence in teaching this area. Having a greater wealth of information from which to use will provide me with a greater base to use different representations of material. I will have access to more examples, demonstrations, experiments which will only benefit the experience I can provide when conveying concepts to students. My students will have a greater understanding of the concepts for which I am able to provide numerous representations, at differing levels. This will also benefit my school by helping to raise the current standardized test scores of students in science. Some of the topics covered in tests like NECAP are difficult for students because they have only seen them in one specific context or example and may not be able to apply their knowledge from that one example to a similar but different situation like they may see on the test. Overall, by developing a deeper understanding of any content related material I will be enriching my teaching and my students and school will benefit from this.
Based on what you have found out, write a 1-2 paragraph narrative outlining at least two ways (PD categories) you will engage in engage in by the end of your first year of teaching. For each activity, explain how you think it will address the need that you have identified.
II. Professional Development Plan
By the end of my first year teaching I would like to have engaged in professional development in the form of teaching workshops and also a research experience. I think that attending teaching workshops that focus on teaching specific concepts within the scope of science, such as the energy workshop held by NEED that I attended this previous fall, I will gain a greater understanding of the specific concepts being addressed, as well as learning new and different ways to teach and represent these concepts. Attending these workshops also provides an opportunity to interact with other science teachers working on the same concepts that may be able to even further my scope of different ways to convey or represent these concepts. These workshops would be useful to reach my professional development goal by serving both the need for greater understanding and providing with alternative or new methods to illustrate concepts. I would also like to attend a teacher research experience for a period of time within this first year or the summer before or after. I feel that as science teachers we should all have the opportunity to work with scientists, act as scientists and get the hands on experience that research provides to truly understand science. Having the chance to study in depth would provide an opportunity to greatly extend my content knowledge in a specific area of science. Doing this will be incredibly useful in teaching because I will not only have learned about subject as a student, but also having worked with the subject I will be able to draw on my own experiences in the classroom to provide multiple representations of material. This is the best way I think I would be able to get a better understanding of content knowledge, and provide me with resources not so easily found in textbooks. I have seen that NASA, many universities, and the NSTA provide very interesting programs specifically catering to the needs of science teachers seeking to participate in research opportunities.